GROUNDPLANS

Faced with the charge that the design of Esperanto's grammar is
parochial, the nearest thing Zamenhof's apologists have to
counter‐evidence is the fact that Esperanto's morphology was
avowedly influenced by “agglutinative” languages
such as Turkish rather than the “fusional” model
dominant in Europe. What this means is that where for
instance Spanish verbs go through various unpredictable mutations
to mark different related senses (hacer = “to make”,
hago = “I make”, hacen = “they make”), the
Turkish equivalents are completely regular, with one affix marking
tense and another to indicate the subject agreement
(yap‐mak = “to make”, yap‐ıyor‑um
= “I make”, yap‐ıyor‑lar = “they
make”). To switch to past tense, Spanish comes up with
another random‐looking form (hicieron = “they made”)
while Turkish just changes the marker in the tense slot
(yap‐ti‑lar = “they made”). It was
recognised well before Zamenhof came along that the Turkish
approach makes a better groundplan for the morphology of a
constructed international auxiliary language, since it avoids the
need to memorise combinatorial tables of conjugations. In
Zamenhof's neighbourhood this groundplan was represented by the
non‐Indo‐European languages Finnish, Estonian, and
Hungarian – all predominantly agglutinative, though
they look very europeanised when put alongside other examples such
as Korean, Luganda, or Quechua.

Zamenhof eagerly adopted the concept of discrete invariable
building‐blocks; but he didn't recognise the distinction between
derivational and inflectional morphology.
It's the derivational system that allows Esperanto morphemes to
link together in long German‐style chains like the compound noun
te‑kruĉo‐mufo‐kolekt‐ist‐ar‑ej‑o
= “tea‐pot‐cosy collectors' club‐house”. Inflectional
morphemes don't get much beyond
ekzil‐it‑o‑j‑n
= “exiles” – and even there, the ‑it
is a composite tense/aspect/mood/voice marker which is
thoroughly fusional, while the ‑ojn is modelled on
the declension patterns of Ancient Greek and would hardly be any
more trouble to learn if the suffixes really were a single
fusional blob. Esperanto is more like a version of German
with better organised inflectional endings than it is like a
paradigm­atically agglutinative language. A genuinely
Turkish‐style Esperanto would handle all the various modal,
reflexive, conditional, or aspectual forms of verbs by stacking
verb endings, so that (for instance) mi ne estos vidita
= “I won't have been seen” would use perfect, passive,
future, negative, and subject‐agreement endings to form something
like, say, vid‐iv‐at‐ur‑en‑im.

The third major option (which has influenced Esperanto's verbal
system there) is the “analytic” groundplan, which
consists of avoiding inflectional morphology, like
subject‐agreement affixes, in favour of separate words, like
explicit subject pronouns. (When it eliminates derivational
morphology as well, that's the fully “isolating”
groundplan.) It turns out that a case can easily be made for
thoroughly analytic solutions being more convenient for more
people:

They have better extensibility – that is, they can be
taken from sparse simplicity to rich subtlety just by learning
more vocabulary.

They accommodate different agreement‐marking instincts
well – you can include or omit or relocate verb
modifiers depending on your mother‐tongue habits, and there's
also nothing to stop you treating them as if they were attached
to the verb as inflections.

Inflecting grammars are basically alien to speakers of languages
with no inflecting features; but the barrier is one‐way, because
there are no languages entirely lacking in analytic features.

Analytic languages are by no means obscure – for a
start they dominate Eastern Asia from China through to Indonesia,
and English is itself largely analytic; that already adds up to
something like forty percent of the human race (and climbing)!

The natural equivalent of the artificial auxiliary language is
the “creole” (which is what a sub‐linguistic pidgin turns into
once children start growing up together as a community of
native‐speakers); they are “designed” by the innate preference
babies have for a complete but easily learnable grammar, and they
tend overwhelmingly to use analytic rather than heavily inflecting
groundplans.

(And for the sake of completeness I should also mention the
fourth basic groundplan: “polysynthetic” grammars
are exemplified by the West Greenlandic one‐word sentence
nalunaarasuartaa­tilioqatigiiffis­sualiulersaalera­luallaraminngooq
= “it seems that they were well into the process of talking
about founding an association for the establishment of a telegraph
station”… but this is rarely proposed as a model for an auxiliary
language!)